Abstract
Critics and curators have historically been gatekeepers within the creative and cultural industries. Both professions carry with them the weight of authority, of having earned their place as arbiters of taste and filters of knowledge. They share the umbrella role of being cultural intermediaries—that is to say, taste makers who contribute to the discourses and definitions of what counts as being worthy of a wider audience, whether that be in a library or museum, gallery or the review pages of a newspaper. This chapter discusses contemporary understandings of cultural curation and criticism. Drawing on case studies that illuminate the tension between traditional gatekeepers and digital influencers, it considers how the framework of reference for attributing value has changed in an era of convergent culture and digital communications.
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Notes
- 1.
This quote is from the survey I conducted between January and March 2019 (see Appendix).
- 2.
In 2011, Facebook went so far as to automatically generate individual galleries of “memories” from its users’ digital lives, by creating a virtual Museum of Me, an action that would likely be greeted with a greater level of scepticism today.
- 3.
See also Saha and van Lente on publisher’s “comping” practices for more on this in Chap. 4.
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Kiernan, A. (2021). Critics and Curators in a Socially Networked Age. In: Writing Cultures and Literary Media. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75081-7_3
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